News & Articles

In his Guest Column, Visiting Assistant Professor Uri Dorchin puts Israel's recent success at the Eurovision contest into the context of what he sees as the country's continuing search for acceptance by the West.

In a conference organized by the International Institute, the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, and multiple campus partners, experts from diverse fields discussed the water challenges facing the Middle East and Africa – and other water insecure regions of the globe.

Speaking about her new novel at the Y&S Nazarian Center, Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen described the “unseen” Israel and the role of literature in revealing the things we don't want to know about ourselves.

Y&S Nazarian Center Visiting Assistant Professor uses his academic background in the Classics as well as Renaissance and Jewish history to teach a variety of courses covering modern Israel sponsored by the Center.

Seventy years after the United Nations voted to partition the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states, Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel Stein Kokin sees striking similarities between modern efforts to resolve territorial disputes and the original partition plan.

As the crisis surrounding the only Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Center in Jerusalem unfolds, UCLA doctoral candidate Yael Assor offers an anthropological perspective on the situation and examines the “labeling” of the parties and its impact on the situation and parties involved.

Faculty & Scholar News

Graduate Student Research Fellowship recipient presents and leads at dance

Israel Studies Graduate Student Research Fellowship recipient Melissa Melpignano shared her research on Israeli dance during the Cold War at the July 5-8 Dance Studies Association Annual Conference held earlier this week at the University of Malta. The PhD candidate in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance presented her paper "Ideologies Contended: Dancing Israel in the Cold War" on the "Choreographing Contention, Dancing Cold War (1940s-1960s)" panel. Melpignano also chaired two other panels and served on the conference's fifteen-person board of directors.

Research conducted by five Center-affiliated scholars was presented at the Association for Israel Studies' June 25-27 annual conference at UC Berkeley. Center Director Yoram Cohen, Research Fellow Liron Lavi, Postdoctoral Fellow Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, and Graduate Student Research Fellowship recipients Yael Assor (Anthropology) and Arnon Degani (History) all shared their research on a wide variety of topics during the three day program. More information can be found on the Center's Presentations page. Deputy Director Maura Resnick also participated in the proceedings as the chair of a panel on Israeli education.

Guest Columns

In his Guest Column, Visiting Assistant Professor Uri Dorchin puts Israel's recent success at the Eurovision contest into the context of what he sees as the country's continuing search for acceptance by the West.